


Stone Gardens

by Gohandinhand



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-21
Updated: 2013-03-21
Packaged: 2017-12-06 01:32:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/730116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gohandinhand/pseuds/Gohandinhand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elena has loved graveyards since she was a little girl. Now, she thinks she just might be too familiar with them. Pre-season one to present day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stone Gardens

Elena always found cemeteries comforting. When she was sixteen, she tried to convince Bonnie and Caroline to clean headstones with her. Mystic Falls had a cemetery incongruously large for such a small town, dating all the way back before the civil war. Two hundred years worth of bodies decomposing under their feet, and some of the headstones had worn away, leaving only pieces of letters or numbers that gave no clue as to the person that resided beneath it. She always ended up going alone.

She turns seventeen the day before the one month anniversary of her parents going off the side of Wickery Bridge and never coming back. She spends it in the cemetery, hiding from an overly concerned Jenna and Bonnie. The dead were good company. They don’t try to talk to her, and they especially don’t ask “How are you, Elena?” She sits in front of one of the old headstones, only the faint tracery of no longer legible numbers and letters left, worn almost smooth, and pulls out her journal. She writes about how it’s the first birthday she didn’t wake up to the smell of her dad making her favorite blueberry pancakes; when the tears get hard to fight she sets her journal down and stares at a headstone, weathered blank. And she wonders about who that person used to be; if they were male or female, how long they lived, who they left behind. Had someone loved them? Now intimately familiar with the panic and pain of drowning, she wonders morbidly if they died painfully.  It’s here for the first time that she puts words to her thoughts about death. She’s learned that everyone dies twice; the first time others notice, but the second time they just fade away. When the last person on earth who knew them dies, when there’s no one left to remember them, that’s when they’ve died for real. When she gets home after dusk fades, Elena says this to Jeremy and he says he understands, but she can see he doesn’t, not really. She sits up that night unable to sleep again, and she spends the hours thinking about who faded completely from the world when her parents left it. Mostly, she wonders whose first death will bring about her parents’ second.

She meets Stefan and Damon for, unknowingly, the second time a few months later. Her axis tilts as she struggles to redefine the world around her once more, one without her parents and now one where death no longer holds the same meaning.  Crowding her head are thoughts of first deaths and second deaths and now, improbably, no death at all. It seems wrong to her in a way she can’t define, and yet it attracts her like a moth to a flame. Thoughts beat at her mind like so many fluttering wings, thoughts of not one death being delayed indefinitely, but the innumerable shadows of once-people the undead were able to carry with them. People that were supposed to have faded entirely from the world, caught like fading sunbeams through a window before nightfall; and for them, the sun will never set. When Katherine turns Caroline, Elena suppresses the thought that her parents won’t have to die again and mentally flays herself for feeling relieved.

Isobel – the person she _understands_ is her mother but doesn’t and now won’t ever _know_ – dies in the Grove Hill cemetery right in front of Elena.  Later, she can appreciate the irony of Isobel dying standing on her own grave, the one Isobel said her parents brought flowers to even though they knew she wasn’t buried there. Elena thinks that maybe Isobel had three deaths in the end.

Isobel turns out to be just the first person she says goodbye to in a graveyard. A few months later, Jenna is another in the long line of Klaus’ victims. Elena dies, temporarily, for the first time herself, and when she comes to, she thinks fleetingly that perhaps she has to reevaluate her numerical system. She buries Jenna and John in the family plot, noting with detachment how quickly the last spots had been filled, and when she gets home she fills a whole page in her journal with nothing but Jenna’s name, repeated over and over. Elena understands now that she won’t ever make it out of Mystic Falls alive, and with the deep guilt she holds for every fresh grave in Gilbert plot, she holds only desperate hope that somehow she can keep Jenna alive longer than she can herself. 

She says goodbye to Alaric in the tomb, and stands in the cemetery to watch him lock himself away onto his deathbed of the cold dirt floor. The thought of the long day in front of her - she’ll no doubt spend it picturing Ric being slowly ripped from the world - seems far more painful than the quick tear her parents and Jenna had left exiting it. She thinks for the first time that the thought of first deaths and second deaths isn’t as comforting when you have too much time to contemplate what’s coming before it happens.

She dies shortly after, and takes Alaric with her. She doesn’t visit the cemetery again.

Jeremy dies at her doppelganger’s hand a few weeks later. She burns his body down with their childhood home, and then she flips her switch. The others make sure to put a headstone for Jeremy in the cemetery, although she made sure his body will never rest there; she doesn’t visit. Six headstones wear slowly down to blankness in the graveyard. Elena fights desperately with every fiber of her being not to care. 


End file.
